Filmmaker uses documentaries to study Japan’s rigorous rituals
The defining experience of Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s childhood left her with badly scraped knees and her classmates with broken bones.
During sixth grade in Osaka, Japan, Yamazaki — now a 34-year-old documentary filmmaker — practiced for weeks with classmates to form a human pyramid seven levels high for an annual school sports day. Despite the blood and tears the children shed as they struggled to make the pyramid work, the accomplishment she felt when the group kept it from toppling became “a beacon of why I feel like I am resilient and hardworking.”
Now Yamazaki, who is halfbritish, half-japanese, is using her documentary eye to chronicle such moments that she believes form the essence of Japanese character, for better or worse.
To outsiders, Japan often is seen as an orderly society where the trains run on time, the streets are impeccably clean, and the people are generally polite and work cooperatively. Yamazaki has trained her camera on the educational practices and rigorous discipline instilled from an early age that she believes create such a society.
Her films present nonjudgmental, nuanced portraits that try to explain why Japan is the way it is, while also showing the potential costs of those practices. By showing the upsides and downsides of Japan’s commonplace rituals, particularly in education, she also invites insiders to interrogate their long-standing customs.
Her latest film, “The Making of a Japanese,” which premiered last fall at the Tokyo International Film Festival, documents one year at an elementary school in western Tokyo, where students align their shoes ramrod straight in storage cubbies, clean their classrooms and serve lunch to their classmates.
In an earlier documentary, “Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams,” Yamazaki showed high school baseball players pushed to physical extremes and often reduced to tears as they vied to compete in Japan’s annual summer tournament.
In the schools highlighted by Yamazaki, both films show what can at times seem like an almost militaristic devotion to order, teamwork and self-sacrifice. But the documentaries also portray teachers and coaches trying to preserve the best of Japanese culture while acknowledging that certain traditions might damage the participants.
“If we can figure out what good things to keep and what should be changed — of course, that’s the million-dollar question,” Yamazaki said.
“If we don’t have those what seem ‘extreme’ parts of society — or more realistically as we have less of it, as I see happening,” Yamazaki wrote in a followup email, “we might see trains in Japan be late in the future.”
Some extreme scenes show up in her films. In “The Making of a Japanese,” for instance, one firstgrade teacher strongly chastises a first-grader and makes her cry in front of her classmates. But the film also shows the young student conquering her deficiencies to proudly perform in front of the school.
Yamazaki “showed the reality as it is,” said Hiroshi Sugita, a professor of education at Kokugakuin University who appears briefly in the film lecturing the school’s faculty.
Having grown up in Japan and then trained as a filmmaker at New York University, Yamazaki has a one-foot-in, one-foot-out perspective.
In contrast to a complete “outsider who is exoticizing things, I think she is able to bring a perspective that has more respect and authenticity,” said Basil Tsiokos, senior programmer of nonfiction features at the Sundance Film Festival who selected two of Yamazaki’s films for documentary showcases in Nantucket, Mass., and New York.
Yamazaki grew up near Osaka, the daughter of a British college professor and Japanese schoolteacher, and spent summers in England. When she transferred from a Japanese school to an international academy in Kobe for her middle and high school years, she was surprised that janitors, not the students, cleaned the classrooms. Relishing the freedom to choose electives, she enrolled in a video film class.
She decided to leave Japan for college partly because, as someone of multiracial heritage, she was tired of being treated as a foreigner.
When she arrived at NYU, most of her classmates wanted to direct feature films. Yamazaki enrolled in a documentary class taught by Sam Pollard, a filmmaker who also worked as an editor for Spike Lee and others, and embraced the medium.
She met her future husband, Eric Nyari, while interviewing for a job to edit a documentary about Japanese composer Ryuichi
Sakamoto that Nyari was producing. She didn’t land the job, but the pair became friends. Nyari, who describes her as “a dictator — in a good way,” is now the primary producer of all her documentaries.
Yamazaki made the leap from editing to professional directing with a short film for Al Jazeera, “Monk by Blood,” that examined the complicated family and gender dynamics at a Buddhist temple in Kyoto.
Next she chose a subject that had nothing to do with Japan. “Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators” brought her more attention as it screened at film festivals in Los Angeles and Nantucket.
Yamazaki and Nyari rented an apartment in Tokyo seven years ago, and Yamazaki began work on “Koshien.”
One of the high schools she wanted to use in the film is where Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani had trained, but his former coach, Hiroshi Sasaki, was wary after years of media requests.
Sasaki softened when he saw how Yamazaki showed up with her crew in the morning, often before the players arrived, and stayed late at night to film the team cleaning the field.
One afternoon, after he had barred her from a particularly dramatic practice and then ribbed her for not filming it, she burst into what she said were tears of frustration because her cameras had missed such a great scene.
“I thought this person really is serious about this, and I was so moved,” Sasaki said in a video interview with The New York Times. The morning after the practice, he invited her to turn on the camera while he watered his collection of bonsai plants and answered questions about his coaching philosophy. That episode became a pivotal scene in the documentary.
Yamazaki, who films her subjects for hundreds of hours, captures vulnerable moments that reveal as much to her subjects as to audiences.
Seita Enomoto, the teacher who chastises a student in “The Making of a Japanese,” said that although some viewers have criticized him, he appreciated that the film also showed the child learning that “she should work hard, and how she changed and succeeded.”
Yamazaki and Nyari hope next to make a documentary about new recruits at a large Japanese employer, where young staffers start with training that can lead to lifelong work at the same company. For now, they are raising their young son in Tokyo and have enrolled him in a Japanese nursery school.
Although human pyramids have been banned by schools because of parental complaints, Yamazaki hopes her son will absorb some of the values that the exercise taught her.
“It was a weird personal experience,” she said, “that I look back on fondly.”